Jennifer Aguilar

She means complementary in the economic sense. Complements are goods or services that are used together, as opposed to substitutes, which essentially compete with each other.

Or take a restaurant. If a restaurant can't find anyone to bus tables, they will hire fewer waiters and waitresses.

And now I'm standing here with Jennifer just a few days after Trump has been sworn in and after his first flurry of executive orders. There haven't been raids in Little Village yet. But Jennifer says the moment Trump was sworn in, the neighborhood changed.

After the break, how all of this economic theory is playing out in the real world. Right now, the chilling effect in action. Here in Chicago's little village, there's this restaurant that's been around since the 70s. It's one of those places that everyone says to check out. Nuevo Leon. The best Mexican food. It was opened by an immigrant. Always a scene.

We got there, and it was this big, beautiful mural building. It sounded wild. Yeah. It had this big marquee sign out front with these light bulbs that sounded like they were about to explode. Here we go.

Cut.

So we went in and it quickly became clear to us that this one restaurant is a microcosm of all the things that economist Chloe East had described.

Do you have some time for us?

She joined us at a table for her couple minutes and we asked her, what has it been like the last few days?

I'm looking around and it's lunchtime. It's like noon right now. And this is a very big restaurant we're in. It holds 170 people. 170 people. I do not see 170 people in here. And when you came in, you were the only table. We were the only ones. Is this typical?

It's that chilling effect. She's had to halve her orders to all her suppliers, cut hours for her employees. She's going day by day right now. And despite everything, feeling somehow still kind of cautiously optimistic.

Our couple minutes with Laura comes to an end. She leaves our table and heads back to work.

After we left Chicago, we checked back in on Little Village. It's been two days since our visit and still no raids as of this recording. Today's episode of Planet Money was produced by Willa Rubin with an assist from Emma Peasley. It was edited by Kenny Malone. It was engineered by Sina Lafredo and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. I'm Erika Barris.

We'll also look to a recent mass deportation effort and how it gave economists an unusual chance to study what really happens when hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers disappear from the labor market. Little Village is not totally a ghost town. We see a fair number of reporters like us coming and going.

Jennifer Aguilar and I are standing in front of a shop that sells quinceañera dresses. Those sparkly ornate gowns girls wear for their coming-of-age parties. We're in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago.

And we felt that on the street. When we stopped people to talk, we heard that people were scared to go into work, that people were keeping their kids home from school. One person who told us she didn't have legal papers was worried about what would happen to her family if she had to go back to Mexico. Her daughters only ever lived in the U.S.

But when we asked all of those people if they'd feel comfortable being recorded, they were like, no, not at all.

Jennifer walks us up in front of what looks like a used clothing store.

There's a sign, plain white paper with handwritten black letters.

And then below that is like a little word of encouragement.

Basically, keep your head up. This too shall pass. Were you expecting a change like this would come? Or has this been a surprise in any way?

As of this recording, five days into the Trump presidency, there have been more than 60 immigration-related executive orders or agency directives. They affect everything from refugee and asylum programs to changing where immigration arrests can occur to challenging the very idea of birthright citizenship. That last one has already been temporarily blocked by a judge.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement says they've been making individual arrests, as they were also doing during the Biden administration. And in terms of the kinds of big surprise raids at businesses or public places, there's reportedly been at least one of those sweeps.

The mayor of Newark, New Jersey, announced this week that agents raided a local establishment and detained undocumented residents as well as U.S. citizens.

What Khloe is waiting to see is what else is happening besides the raids. How the Trump administration plans to systematically deport millions of people as they've promised.

When President Obama left office in 2017, he had been nicknamed the deporter-in-chief. And that is, in part, because of this one particular mass deportation effort.

Okay. Yes. You were styling. Jennifer is now executive director of Little Village's Chamber of Commerce. And to be clear, Little Village is not little. The neighborhood's main corridor is about two miles with more than a thousand shops and businesses. After the magnificent mile in downtown Chicago, Little Village generates the most money in the city.

You can actually find a law enforcement training video from 13 years ago when this program was being expanded.

This video was made for local law enforcement agencies, you know, like police departments. And it was made by the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, because under this new program, those local police departments were suddenly a big part of this national deportation effort, Secure Communities.

So, yeah, the message from DHS to local law enforcement was this doesn't really change anything you do. We'll make it easy.

I wanted to stop here because I just wanted to stand in front of these beautiful dresses.

Now, we don't know if this new Trump administration plans to use this exact program. But Trump did use a version of secure communities during his last term. And, Chloe says, it seems clear he's already approaching immigration and deportation in a similar way, leaning on local law enforcement to be part of the effort and trying to expand the list of crimes that can get someone deported.

And this American workers justification, this is what Chloe East has specifically been studying.

citizen workers. In other words, under that simplest sort of diagram of all this, you might assume that reducing the number of immigrants would increase jobs and wages of U.S.-born workers.

And Chloe says that is a pretty big assumption that can be hard to test. But as she looked at the Obama-era Secure Communities Initiative, she realized that it was an ideal natural experiment.

Plus, once Secure Communities started somewhere, it was pretty much a uniform program of deportation. It didn't matter a place's political leanings, their own local views on immigration, how local law enforcement worked.

What they found was that when people without legal status were removed from a labor market, it did not lead to more jobs for U.S. citizens. It had the opposite effect. It led to fewer jobs for U.S. citizens.

Right. That's a big effect. It is. So why? Why might that be happening?

And this isn't just about deportations. Chloe says secure communities likely also had a chilling effect. You know, people would have stopped working, didn't want to leave their homes or maybe even left the U.S. completely. All of that would be a hit to the local economy and would cause a drop in jobs for U.S.-born workers.

This is exactly what we saw happening in the Little Village neighborhood in Chicago.